TripAdvisor Japan to Give Away T-Shirts Full of Overseas Obscenities, We Examine Their Meanings

Popular travel website TripAdvisor is giving away 100 free T-Shirts to lucky visitors to their Japanese website. What’s the catch you might ask? They are covered with hand gestures deemed obscene by other countries’ peoples.

The T-shirts are based on a TripGraphic (trip infographic) the company released which illustrates 12 hand gestures considered innocuous in Japan but may lead to bodily harm in other parts of the world.

It’s hard to verify the authenticity of these gestures without being a hardcore world traveler/anthropologist but they seem to cover a wide range of offensiveness. Let’s have a look at the TripGraphic in English.

01. “This offensive gesture comes from an old act of throwing things at criminals with two fingers. (Greece)”

Already we’re off to a weird start methinks. This explanation smelled fishy so I researched it and in all of Googledom I couldn’t find any story matching this. Perhaps a Greek person could clear the air here?

In North America, people don’t mind this so much. It usually means you want two of something.

11. “This insulting gesture has sexual origins. (England)”

I wish I was able to put the Bevis and Butthead laugh into written form right now. Really?! The shocker made this list? Granted it’s certainly not a clean gesture, but doing this in western country will probably just make people laugh at you.

12. “This gesture offends people by representing genitals. (Vietnam)”

Do Vietnamese people have twisty looking genitals like that?

There you have it. Again, these explanations should be taken with a grain of salt as hand gestures’ histories and meanings are full of urban legends.

For readers outside of Japan, you can also note the opposite of this chart. All of these gestures are more or less fine to do here. I can vouch for that as I see so many people flinging around their middle fingers in Japan it’s like I’m on an LA freeway.

TripAdvisor is taking contest entries for the T-Shirts until the end of June.